Software Huddle

Today, on the show we have Christine Spang, Co-founder and CTO of Nylas. Christine was the keynote at the recent Shift Developer Conference in Miami, and we caught up with her there. Nylas is a unified API for email, calendar, and contacts. We talked to Christine about why she started Nylas, and the challenges with building an API for email.Email is this massive distributed system with a very diverse set of implementations, it's a super gnarly ecosystem going back decades. It's generally not something you want to spend a lot of time on if you don't have to. Christine was a lot of fun to have on the show.Follow Christine: https://twitter.com/spangFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconerFollow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrieNylas: https://www.nylas.com/Software Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleSubstack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com

Today’s guest is Ivan Burazin, the co-founder and CEO of Daytona, an actual creator of the Shift Developer Conference that he sold some time ago to Infobip. Ivan has tons of experience building developer tools, he has been working on dev environments for over a decade.In this interview, we talk about another company he founded called CodeAnywhere that eventually led to the founding of Daytona. Daytona is a dev environment management platform. It sits between your IDE and the cloud, taking care of standardizing your dev environments, regardless of whether you're building on your desktop or deploying to production.They're taking the best of what leading technology companies like Google, Uber, and Meta have built internally and bringing that to the rest of the world.Software Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleSubstack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Today's episode is with Nikhil Benesch, who's the co-founder and CTO at Materialize, an Operational Data Warehouse. Materialize gets you the best of both worlds, combining the capabilities of your data warehouse with the immediacy of streaming. This fusion allows businesses to operate with data in real-time.We discussed the data infrastructure stuff of it, how they built it, how they think about billing, how they think about cloud primitives and what they wish they had.

Today's episode is with Khawaja Shams. Khawaja is the CEO and co-founder of Momento, which is a Serverless Cache.  He used to lead the DynamoDB team at AWS and now he's doing Memento. We talk about a lot of different things, including multi-tenancy and cellular architecture and what it's like to build on AWS and sell infrastructure products to end customers and just a lot of other really good stuff.We hope you enjoy this episode.01:12 Introduction03:38 multi-tenancy 08:13 S3 and Tigris15:09 Aurora19:11 Momento31:21 Cellular Architecture41:16 Most people are doing cross-AZ wrong52:23 Elasticsearch01:03:08 Rapid Fire

In today's episode with Tim McNamara, we talk all about Rust. Tim is one of the leading educators in the whole Rust educational space. He wrote the Rust in Action book, which is probably the best Rust book out there. He has a YouTube channel, he taught and did a lot of educational work on Rust at Amazon AWS.We talked about object ownership and object lifetimes and just all these interesting things that Rust has and why is this language loved by so many and why it's continuing to grow.He also gets into what it's like being an independent educator, creator, and some of the difficulties with that, how to get started, and how he deals with doubt.

Kent C Dodds, a renowned JavaScript and web development expert, dives into his transformative journey from engineer to educator. He discusses the creation of his Epic Web Dev platform, focusing on hands-on learning. The conversation reveals why so many JavaScript frameworks exist and how they reflect developer dissatisfaction. Kent also shares insights on the importance of pacing in learning and the evolution of web architecture, introducing his innovative PESPA concept. Tune in for quick-fire tech preferences and exciting future events!

Welcome back to an episode where we're talking Vectors, Vector Databases, and AI with Linpeng Tang, CTO and co-founder of MyScale. MyScale is a super interesting technology. They're combining the best of OLAP databases with Vector Search. The project started back in 2019 where they forked ClickHouse and then adapted it to support Vector Storage, Indexing, and Search.The really unique and cool thing is you get the familiarity and usability of SQL with the power of being able to compare the similarity between unstructured data.We think this has really fascinating use cases for analytics well beyond what we're seeing with other vector database technology that's mostly restricted to building RAG models for LLMs. Also, because it's built on ClickHouse, MyScale is massively scalable, which is an area that many of the dedicated vector databases actually struggle with.We cover a lot about how vector databases work, why they decided to build off of ClickHouse, and how they plan to open source the database.Timestamps02:29 Introduction 06:22 Value of a Vector Database 12:40 Forking ClickHouse 18:53 Transforming Clickhouse into a SQL vector database 32:08 Data modeling 32:56 What data can be Vectorized 38:37 Indexing 43:35 Achieving Scale 46:35 Bottlenecks 48:41 MyScale vs other dedicated Vector Databases 51:38 Going Open Source 56:04 Closing thoughts

Today's guest is Yujian Tang from Zilliz, one of the big players in the vector database market. This is the first episode in a series of episodes we’re doing on vectors and vector databases. We start with the basics, what is a vector? What are vector embeddings? How does vector search work? And why the heck do I even need a vector database? RAG models for customizing LLMs is where vector databases are getting a lot of their use. On the surface, it seems pretty simple, but in reality, there's a lot of tinkering that goes into taking RAG to production.Yujian explains some of the tripwires that you might run into and how to think through those problems. We think you're going to really enjoy this episode.Timestamps02:08 Introduction03:16 What is a Vector?07:01 How does Vector Search work?14:08 Why need a Vector database?15:11 Use Cases17:37 What is RAG?20:34 RAG vs fine-tuning29:51 Measuring Performance32:32 Is RAG here to stay?35:43 Milvus37:17 History of Milvus47:44 Rapid FireXhttps://twitter.com/yujian_tanghttps://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Tyler Wells, CTO and co-founder at Propel, discusses building data platforms at Twilio and Skype. Topics include real-time analytics challenges, Propel's solutions, infrastructure development insights, S3's importance, and the impact of AI on software engineering.

Head of DevRel for Elastic, Philipp Krenn, discusses Elasticsearch fundamentals covering topics like Use Cases, Indexing, Shards, Replicas, and Bottlenecks. He also touches on where not to use Elasticsearch and the process of upgrading an Elasticsearch Cluster.